Gilgamesh Ventures: From Fintech Media Network to Global Early-Stage VC — Miguel Armaza, Andrew Endicott, and the Rise of Content-Driven Capital

1. The first point to clarify is founder identity: the two founders that can be clearly confirmed from Gilgamesh Ventures’ own public materials are Miguel Armaza and Andrew Endicott.

Gilgamesh Ventures is not a firm built around a single celebrity founder. It was created by two people with unusually complementary paths. Miguel Armaza followed a trajectory that can roughly be described as banker → fintech media/network builder → angel investor → venture capitalist. Andrew Endicott followed law → investment banking → fintech founder/operator → venture capitalist. Gilgamesh’s current website calls both men Founding Partners, and the firm’s 2022 launch announcement explicitly identified Andrew Endicott and Miguel Armaza as its co-founders.

Third-party database Crunchbase has at times also listed Sue Choe as a co-founder. Gilgamesh’s own launch announcement, however, did not describe her that way; instead, it specifically thanked Sue Choe for her invaluable contributions in helping get the firm off the ground. Therefore, public accounts differ regarding Sue Choe’s formal founder status; the clearest first-party account identifies Miguel Armaza and Andrew Endicott as the co-founders.

Gilgamesh’s positioning has also evolved. At its 2022 public launch, it described itself as an early-stage fintech VC investing across the United States and Latin America. Its 2023 Fund I retrospective continued to emphasize the Americas. The current website, however, calls Gilgamesh a “global, early-stage fintech venture capital fund.” After closing a $20 million Fund II in 2025, the firm reported approximately $35 million in assets under management and 44 portfolio companies across more than ten markets. By 2026, the University of Arkansas’ official biography of Andrew described Gilgamesh as having 45 investments globally.

2. The most interesting feature of Gilgamesh is not its fund size, but the way it turns media, relationships, expertise, LPs and deal flow into a single flywheel.

At roughly $35 million of publicly reported AUM, Gilgamesh is not a large multistage venture platform; Venture Capital Journal covered Fund II in the context of emerging managers. Its competitive advantage appears to lie elsewhere: Miguel’s fintech media network + Andrew’s genuine operating experience + both founders’ traditional financial backgrounds + U.S./Latin America cross-border relationships + a base of LPs and advisers who are themselves fintech founders, CEOs, banks and investors.

The firm has disclosed concrete evidence of this model. In its 2023 Fund I retrospective, Gilgamesh said approximately one-third of its investments had been sourced through the Fintech Leaders audience and network, especially LinkedIn inbound, while numerous podcast guests had subsequently become LPs. Its 2022 launch article named industry figures such as Steve Sarracino, Renaud Laplanche, Laura Spiekerman, Dan Henry, Santiago Suarez and Brian Barnes among the broader guest/investor network. Miguel therefore did not simply launch a podcast as a marketing channel for a fund: he turned media into a long-term relationship system, fundraising channel and deal-sourcing engine.

A useful description of Gilgamesh is therefore: a relatively small, vertically specialized, relationship-dense, media-enabled, generally non-lead early-stage fintech VC. Its most compelling publicly visible asset today is not yet one enormous realized exit, but a network that continuously produces founders, LP relationships, co-investors and industry information.

3. Miguel Armaza’s family and upbringing help explain his later identity as a cross-border connector.

A Lauder Institute biography states that Miguel was born in Rome, Italy, into a family of Bolivian diplomats. In a long-form career interview, he described himself as being originally from Bolivia but having grown up in many parts of the world before coming to the United States as an immigrant. Gilgamesh’s own biography says he has lived in Bolivia, China, Russia, Ireland, Uruguay, Italy and the United States, and speaks Spanish, Russian and English.

It would be inaccurate, however, to infer from “diplomatic family + international upbringing” that he came from a finance or business dynasty. Miguel has explicitly said that he did not grow up in a finance family; his father worked in Bolivian public service, and business was not what the family discussed around the dinner table. One reason he chose banking was precisely to learn how business worked.

That upbringing later mapped directly onto his professional identity. Miguel has described a long-standing desire to serve as a bridge between the United States, Latin America and emerging markets. Having lived in places such as China and Russia gave him a naturally cross-market view of financial services; his U.S.–Latin America positioning as an investor is therefore a continuation of his personal history rather than merely a branding exercise.

Detailed information about his parents’ exact positions, family wealth or extended family is publicly limited. What can be established is a highly international upbringing, a Bolivian public-service/diplomatic background and the fact that he did not describe his family as a traditional finance family.

4. Miguel’s educational path was unusually non-linear: Community College → American University → Wharton/Lauder. That progression became an important part of how he built his career.

Miguel began his U.S. higher education at Houston Community College before transferring to American University in Washington, D.C. Public professional information indicates that his undergraduate studies were centered around business, finance and information technology. Years later, at the University of Pennsylvania, he completed both a Wharton MBA and a Lauder Institute MA, with a Europe/Russian-language focus at Lauder.

Miguel frequently emphasizes both the community-college beginning and his immigrant identity. He has said that this background made him feel he needed to work harder than those around him. At Wharton, that translated into an aggressive effort to take advantage of almost every fintech resource available: he became co-president of Wharton FinTech and a co-host of the Wharton Fintech Podcast alongside people including Ryan Zauk.

The most important part of Wharton for him was arguably not the MBA curriculum itself, but the institutional amplification of network and reputation. Shortly before he arrived, Wharton had created the Stevens Center for Innovation in Finance. Miguel treated the student-run podcast almost like a startup, increasing publication from a few episodes per month to roughly four per week and growing monthly reach about thirteen-fold to nearly 130,000. He has said that, in some respects, he learned more directly from guests than from many classes.

That distinction is fundamental to understanding him: Miguel did not become a prominent investor and then launch media. He first used media to acquire knowledge, relationships and industry identity, then converted those capabilities into an investment platform.

5. Andrew Endicott came from almost the opposite direction: from inside the traditional legal and financial system toward entrepreneurship and venture capital.

In a published transcript based on an interview with Andrew, he described himself as born in Mississippi and raised in Arkansas. The University of Arkansas is central to his professional identity: the university identifies him as a B.S.B.A. ’09 graduate; he later attended Harvard Law School, receiving his J.D. in 2012. He also received academic recognition at the Walton College, including a Presidential Scholar award.

His explanation for law school is revealing. His undergraduate years overlapped with the 2008–2009 financial crisis, disrupting his initial Wall Street plans. He went to Harvard Law and later explained that what attracted him to law was not simply legal practice, but the opportunity to understand complicated systems, public policy and institutions from a holistic perspective.

After graduation, he worked in corporate law at Willkie Farr & Gallagher, including M&A and securities-related work, then moved into investment banking at Lazard, where his exposure included consumer finance and non-bank lenders. Both Gilgamesh’s official biography and early Petal interviews document this progression.

Andrew’s fintech worldview was therefore formed differently from Miguel’s. Miguel saw the problem through legacy banking technology, cross-border markets, media and investor networks. Andrew saw it through law, transactions, lending assets, financing structures and the realities of operating a regulated fintech company. That complementarity became one of Gilgamesh’s defining organizational features.

6. The way each founder entered fintech helps explain why Gilgamesh became so specialized.

Miguel spent close to a decade across Citi and MUFG/Bank of Tokyo in multiple roles. He has singled out several years in operations and technology as especially consequential: around 2013–2014, even inside the sophisticated New York financial system, he saw outdated technology and organizational inefficiency, which drew him toward fintech. His first direct step into fintech investing was a very small angel investment made with his own savings.

Andrew’s key entry point was Petal. Petal sought to address the exclusion of “thin-file” and credit-invisible consumers from traditional credit by using bank cash-flow information as part of underwriting rather than relying only on conventional credit scores. Andrew served in roles including co-founder, President and CFO. A 2019 Wharton Fintech interview already described the company’s core approach as cash-flow underwriting.

Petal eventually reached substantial scale. Gilgamesh said in 2022 that Andrew had helped Petal hire hundreds of employees and raise roughly $250 million in equity and $500 million in debt. In 2026, the University of Arkansas stated that Petal eventually generated approximately $100 million in annual gross revenue, served half a million U.S. customers, and was sold to Empower in 2024.

Andrew left Petal in fall 2021 to focus full-time on Gilgamesh. This matters because Gilgamesh was not created by two conventional career venture investors leaving established funds. It began while one founder was still an MBA student/media builder and the other was still an executive at a rapidly growing fintech company.

7. Gilgamesh’s founding date is best understood in stages: 2020 was the SPV beginning, 2021 was institutionalization, and 2022 was the public launch.

Different public sources cite either 2020 or 2021 because the firm was not created in a single step.

Around April 2020, the group began with small single-deal SPVs. Miguel has described the progression as starting with personal angel investments, then pooling capital with friends, and then completing roughly five one-company SPVs. Once he concluded that this approach would not provide enough capital or consistency to access the best opportunities, the group decided to raise a fund.

2021 can reasonably be treated as the institutional Fund I starting point; the firm later described Fund I as launching in 2021. The University of Arkansas, meanwhile, says Andrew and Miguel co-founded Gilgamesh in 2020.

In January 2022, Gilgamesh made its major public launch announcement. At that time, it disclosed $9.5 million in aggregate commitments, more than $2.7 million invested across 16 companies, and a strategy of generally writing non-lead checks from pre-seed through Series A, with selective later follow-ons.

By June 2023, Fund I made its final investment in a new company, bringing the total to 30 portfolio companies. The cleanest timeline is therefore: 2020 SPV experimentation → 2021 institutional Fund I → 2022 public launch → 2023 completion of approximately 30 new-company Fund I investments.

8. Fund I’s strategy was unusually explicit: fintech-only, early-stage, generally non-lead, U.S.–Latin America oriented, with increasing emphasis on valuation and capital efficiency.

Gilgamesh’s 2023 retrospective disclosed unusually detailed portfolio statistics. Roughly 30% of backed founders were repeat entrepreneurs, while about 27% had previously worked at fast-growing technology/fintech companies such as Uber, Amazon, Rappi, Petal and dLocal. About one-fifth of portfolio companies had a female co-founder, roughly one-fifth had a person of color as a co-founder, and about three-quarters had a Latino co-founder. By business model, approximately 73% were B2B, 20% B2C and 7% B2B2C; fewer than one-quarter were lending companies.

This shows that Gilgamesh is not simply a digital-bank or consumer-credit fund. It invests more broadly across financial infrastructure, payments, insurance, capital markets, software and businesses that “accelerate commerce.” By 2025, Miguel summarized the current strategy as encompassing payments, software, lending, insurance, capital markets and financial infrastructure.

One of the firm’s more distinctive concepts in its Fund I retrospective was the idea of “Fission-Powered” businesses: companies capable of creating large amounts of incremental value with relatively modest capital requirements, rather than businesses that depend on continuous fundraising and cash burn to sustain growth. Following the technology valuation reset after 2022, capital efficiency and valuation discipline became increasingly prominent in the firm’s framework. Gilgamesh has also said it wants individual investments to have theoretical upside large enough to return the fund and uses diversification over investment timing to reduce vintage-price risk.

Fund II added a stronger AI dimension. In 2025, Miguel said the firm was particularly interested in financial companies taking advantage of new AI tooling. The geography also expanded from the Americas toward global fintech, while the United States, Brazil and Mexico remained major areas of emphasis. Third-party fund database F4 reports that Fund II seed checks may reach roughly $400,000–$600,000; because this is a third-party estimate rather than a disclosed fund contract, it is better treated as a market indication than a fixed policy.

9. Gilgamesh has an unusual capital network: LPs are not merely sources of money; they are part of the operating ecosystem.

Early disclosed backers in 2022 included Peter Fernandez of 99, Marcelo Lima of Monashees, Ignacio Canals of Migrante, multiple family offices, Mexico’s NOA Capital, Encore Bank and Foundation Capital. The firm also said roughly one-third of its LPs were connected to the Wharton/University of Pennsylvania alumni network.

More strategically important is the network of fintech operators. Gilgamesh’s launch materials referenced relationships/investors drawn from podcast guests and industry figures including Renaud Laplanche of Upgrade/LendingClub, Alloy co-founder Laura Spiekerman, former Green Dot CEO Dan Henry, Addi co-founder Santiago Suarez, Nium founder Prajit Nanu, and M1 founder Brian Barnes. Not everyone mentioned should be assumed to have invested the same amount, but the list demonstrates that Gilgamesh deliberately embedded fintech operators into its capital, information and relationship network.

In May 2025, Gilgamesh closed a $20 million Fund II. Venture Capital Journal reported LPs including Foundation Capital, GBM Ventures, Encore Bank and more than a dozen U.S. and international family offices, bringing reported AUM to approximately $35 million. GBM CEO Pedro de Garay’s public endorsement focused specifically on Gilgamesh’s connectivity, deal flow and fintech expertise rather than its fund size.

The structure is clear: professional VCs such as Foundation Capital provide institutional credibility; Encore and GBM deepen the financial-institution network; fintech founders contribute operating expertise and deal access; family offices provide flexible capital; Wharton and Lauder contribute talent and relationship density.

10. The legal structure confirms that Gilgamesh evolved from a deal-by-deal investment network into a genuine fund-management platform rather than simply being a media brand presenting itself as a VC.

SEC Form D filings provide concrete evidence. For example, a 2022 filing for Gilgamesh Xepelin Fintech II LP lists Gilgamesh Ventures LLC as the management company and Gilgamesh Fintech Ventures A GP LLC as general partner, with Andrew Endicott and Miguel Armaza listed among the relevant managers. The SPV was classified as a venture-capital pooled investment fund using Rule 506(b) and reported approximately $600,000 sold to 22 investors at the time of filing.

That filing makes the early SPV story tangible. These were not merely informal groups of friends pooling cash; Gilgamesh used formal LP/GP entities for single-company transactions. Fund I and Fund II then evolved that deal-by-deal structure into diversified fund vehicles.

However, fund AUM should never be confused with the founders’ personal wealth. Most fund capital is LP capital under management, and portfolio-company shares are held through the relevant fund or SPV. Andrew and Miguel’s precise ownership stakes in the management company, GP economics and carried-interest allocation are not publicly confirmed.

11. Gilgamesh’s assets divide naturally into financial assets and influence assets.

The financial/organizational layer includes Gilgamesh Ventures LLC, its GP/LP fund entities and SPVs, portfolio-company stakes held by those entities, and the economic rights associated with managing the funds. SEC records verify the existence of the management company, GP and SPVs, although they do not disclose each founder’s ownership or carry split.

Its influence assets may be even more strategically important.

The first is Fintech Leaders Podcast / Newsletter. Different 2026 platforms use different measurement conventions: Apple Podcasts refers to roughly 85,000+ readers and listeners worldwide; Miguel’s public LinkedIn information says approximately 90,000+ subscribers/followers across 180+ countries; Newport Global Summit uses a figure of 100,000+ followers and about three million views in 2024. The safest conclusion is therefore that the media property has a professional audience in the high tens of thousands to roughly 100,000-plus range, rather than treating any one number as uniquely definitive.

The second is the Wharton/Lauder network. Miguel is an alumnus of both programs, and Gilgamesh has said roughly one-third of its early LP base was tied to the Penn ecosystem, showing that the school network directly contributed to fundraising rather than serving merely as résumé signaling.

The third is the operator/adviser network. Gilgamesh’s current website lists senior advisers including Encore Bank executive Burt Hicks, Spin Pay/NuPay co-founder Alan Chusid, and longtime technology investor Tuvia Barak. Paula You joined in 2022 as Partner/COO with responsibility for platform growth, but she is no longer listed on the current official team page; public information about the timing and circumstances of her departure is limited.

Fintech Leaders, Wharton, LPs, advisers, scouts and founder communities are therefore not traditional balance-sheet assets, but they are arguably Gilgamesh’s most valuable influence and information assets.

12. Gilgamesh’s business model is best understood as “investment management plus a content-driven, low-friction distribution and acquisition system,” rather than a podcast advertising business.

As a venture management platform, its fundamental economics come from managing investment vehicles and the appreciation of investments. Gilgamesh has not publicly disclosed its precise management-fee or carried-interest terms, so standard industry formulations such as “2-and-20” should not be assumed to apply.

What the public record does establish is that media reduces friction in fundraising and deal sourcing.

Miguel began accumulating CEO, founder and investor relationships through Wharton Fintech Podcast. In July 2020, before graduation, he launched Fintech Leaders Newsletter, with an interview with Nubank founder David Vélez among the early content. It had roughly 25,000 subscribers by graduation and nearly 30,000 by late 2021, subsequently growing into today’s much larger audience.

Gilgamesh then embedded that audience in its fund flywheel: interview industry leaders → build private trust and reputation → convert some guests into mentors/LPs/co-investors → generate founder inbound from the audience → invest → help portfolio companies with exposure and relationships → bring more founders and executives into the media ecosystem. The firm’s own claim that roughly one-third of Fund I investments were sourced through the Fintech Leaders audience demonstrates that this is an operating model, not merely a theoretical interpretation.

Andrew supplies the other half of that proposition. Portfolio founders are not only offered media connectivity through Miguel; they gain access to a GP who has personally dealt with fintech equity financing, debt financing, regulation, credit, recruiting and scaling. In 2022, Gilgamesh explicitly identified recruiting, debt/equity fundraising, partnerships and media connections as areas in which it attempts to support portfolio companies.

The objective is therefore not to write the biggest check. It is to convince founders that even when Gilgamesh is not the largest investor in a round, its relationship network and execution assistance justify giving it room on the cap table.

13. Gilgamesh’s most visible investment achievements so far are not one giant realized exit, but a group of early investments that subsequently reached larger financing rounds or strategic transactions.

Representative early portfolio companies include Klar, Xepelin, Pomelo, Divibank, Frontrunner, Glean.ai, Cayena, Nexu and Modern Life. Klar, Xepelin and Pomelo were already in the portfolio when Gilgamesh publicly launched in 2022, meaning its entry occurred well before several of their later large financing rounds.

Klar is among the clearest public growth cases. In 2022, it raised $90 million in a round led by General Atlantic. In 2025, it completed approximately $190 million of Series C financing, including about $170 million of equity and $20 million of venture debt, at a reported valuation of roughly $800 million.

Cayena later raised a $55 million Series B led by Bicycle Capital. Its marketplace and financial infrastructure for Brazilian restaurant and food-wholesale procurement closely fits Gilgamesh’s stated thesis of investing in businesses that accelerate commerce.

Glean.ai produced a verifiable liquidity event. In April 2025, embedded-finance company Pipe announced its acquisition of Glean.ai, and Axios reported that the transaction was all-stock. The purchase price was not publicly disclosed, so Gilgamesh’s return multiple cannot be calculated, but the acquisition at least establishes a genuine M&A exit from the Fund I portfolio.

Xepelin is useful as a reminder that “star portfolio company” does not mean a straight-line outcome. In 2022 it raised a $111 million Series B, described by the company as the largest Series B in Chilean history. By 2026, however, a roughly $20 million bridge financing reportedly valued the company at about $400 million, more than 40% below a previous valuation of roughly $720 million. Gilgamesh’s portfolio therefore also reflects the repricing that followed the 2021–2022 fintech valuation boom.

For that reason, performance claims should remain disciplined. Gilgamesh has several clearly growing portfolio companies and at least one publicly verified M&A exit, but fund-level realized return, DPI, TVPI and independently verified/audited IRR are not publicly available in sufficient detail to establish the fund’s ultimate performance. Higher IRR figures have circulated in secondary commentary, but without primary fund reporting they should not be treated as confirmed results.

14. The most important turning points in the founders’ lives can be understood as successive upgrades in identity and leverage.

The first occurred during Miguel’s undergraduate years. He ran an early Facebook page that reached nearly three million followers, sold advertising against the audience, and used some of the revenue to help pay for college. Facebook policy changes eventually ended the project. It was an early demonstration that an audience could be converted into economic value and relationships.

The second was Miguel choosing banking rather than immediately becoming an entrepreneur. He has explained that, because he lacked a family background in finance, banking became his training ground for learning business. His Citi/MUFG operations-and-technology experience then exposed him to the systems inside traditional finance that needed modernization.

The third was Wharton. Miguel did not treat Wharton simply as a credential; he transformed student organizations and podcasting into personal network infrastructure. That network was a genuine pre-existing asset required for Gilgamesh to work.

The fourth was moving from angel investing and SPVs to a fund. Miguel has said that once the group realized personal capital, friends’ money and one-off SPVs were insufficient to repeatedly access the companies they considered most consequential, a pooled fund became the natural next step.

The fifth was Andrew leaving Petal in fall 2021. He was leaving the management team of a heavily financed fintech company to become a full-time investor, transforming Gilgamesh from something that could be perceived as a media-led investment experiment into an organization with genuine founder/operator credibility.

The sixth was the 2022–2025 change in the venture environment. Gilgamesh became more explicit about valuation discipline, capital efficiency and its “Fission-Powered” framework after Fund I; Fund II then incorporated AI-native/AI-enabled financial services and expanded geographic ambition from the Americas to global markets.

15. The most significant negative information associated with Andrew Endicott is the Cassandra Shih lawsuit concerning Petal’s founding. It requires careful legal framing.

On June 19, 2018, Cassandra Shih sued Petal, Andrew Endicott, Jason Gross and others in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Shih alleged that in 2015 she presented Endicott with a “CreditBridge” business concept focused on helping immigrants in the United States obtain credit, that they formed an oral joint venture and discussed a 50/50 partnership, and that Endicott later stopped working with her while continuing to develop the related company with others, eventually resulting in Petal.

In 2020, when defendants sought dismissal of the second amended complaint, the court held that Shih had pleaded sufficient facts to make her allegations of an oral joint venture and certain related claims against Endicott plausible at that procedural stage. The court therefore declined to dismiss the principal claims against Endicott, while dismissing some other claims.

A critical distinction is necessary: denial of a motion to dismiss is not a final judicial finding that Andrew stole an idea or breached a partnership. Under the Rule 12(b)(6) standard, the court generally assumes adequately pleaded factual allegations are true for purposes of deciding whether a claim may proceed. It is a procedural determination, not a final merits judgment.

Petal and the defendants denied Shih’s allegations. Their lawyers argued that the parties had merely exchanged early, vague business ideas and never created an agreement that entitled Shih to half of the eventual company. American Banker reported in 2022 that Petal continued to contest the claims.

Business Insider also reported on an email produced during discovery in which Endicott referred to Shih using language with derogatory and sexual overtones. That evidence added a reputational dimension to the dispute. The publication reported that defense lawyers did not deny that the email had been sent, instead saying that it spoke for itself.

The publicly accessible Justia docket shows the litigation continuing at least into April 2022 through discovery and deposition-related proceedings. Available public materials do not reliably establish whether the case ultimately ended through settlement, dismissal or another disposition. Therefore, the final liability and compensation outcome remains unconfirmed from the available public record.

The dispute is not legally equivalent to misconduct by Gilgamesh Ventures itself, but it is an important part of evaluating Andrew’s entrepreneurial history. The accurate formulation is that there was a serious founder-ownership/business-idea dispute accompanied by controversial email evidence—not that a final court judgment established that Andrew “stole Petal.”

16. As of 2026, Gilgamesh’s real-world position is relatively clear: it is not a top-tier mega-fund, but it has successfully evolved from a personal angel-investment experiment into a recognized international specialist fintech emerging manager.

After closing its $20 million Fund II in 2025, reported AUM reached approximately $35 million and the portfolio stood at 44 companies across more than ten markets. The University of Arkansas’ 2026 biography of Andrew later described the firm as having 45 investments globally.

Geographically, it is no longer synonymous with a Latin America fund. In 2025 Miguel described the strategy as global fintech with special emphasis on the United States, Brazil and Mexico. In a 2026 interview with Crunchbase News, he said Gilgamesh had invested that year in the United States and Europe; although early-stage fintech activity in Latin America had slowed, the firm continued to pursue a Latin American pipeline. In other words, Latin America remains a major competence and relationship network for Gilgamesh, but no longer defines its investment boundary.

Miguel’s personal identity has likewise evolved from “Wharton Fintech podcast host” into a genuine investor-media hybrid with an independent platform. By August 2026, Fintech Leaders had reached roughly Episode 206; on August 11 it published Miguel’s second interview with Kaspi CEO Mikhail Lomtadze, recorded in Kazakhstan. Other recent guests have included Max Levchin, Renaud Laplanche and Motive Partners founder Rob Heyvaert.

Andrew, meanwhile, is expanding into the role of a fintech practitioner-thinker. In 2026 he published Is Finance Technology? Insights for Building an Enduring Fintech Company, examining why fintech companies fail and the complexity of risk, fraud, regulation and the intersection of finance and technology. He remains a Gilgamesh GP; University of Arkansas materials also state that he has served on Encore Bank’s board since 2019 and Mangrove Property Insurance Company’s board since 2024.

Over a longer time horizon, Gilgamesh’s clearest success is not yet that it has been proven to be one of the highest-returning venture funds—public fund-performance data are insufficient to support that conclusion. Its more demonstrable achievement is that it has completed three structural transformations:

from personal/network investing to an institutional fund;
from a media audience to measurable deal flow and LP acquisition;
from a U.S.–Latin America fintech niche to an increasingly global specialist fintech network.

That also captures the founders’ real positions inside the structure: Miguel is the distribution, relationship, cross-border sourcing and narrative engine; Andrew is the founder-credibility, financial-services operating, legal/regulatory and capital-structure engine. Gilgamesh’s differentiation comes precisely from the fact that those capabilities do not substantially overlap.

Compressed into key years, the evolution looks like this:

Around 2009–2012: Andrew moved from the University of Arkansas to Harvard Law and then into Willkie and Lazard; Miguel progressed from community college and American University into banking.

Around 2013–2015: Miguel’s bank operations/technology experience drew him toward fintech; Andrew entered the entrepreneurial path that eventually became Petal.

2015–2021: Andrew built Petal; Miguel moved from Citi/MUFG to Wharton/Lauder and transformed the Wharton Fintech Podcast into a large professional industry node.

2020: Miguel launched Fintech Leaders, while Gilgamesh began angel/SPV investing.

2021: Fund I became institutionalized, and Andrew left Petal in the fall to focus full-time on Gilgamesh.

2022: Gilgamesh publicly launched with $9.5 million of commitments and 16 portfolio companies.

2023: Fund I completed its 30th new-company investment and articulated a more systematic capital-efficient, valuation-disciplined investment framework.

2024: Petal was sold to Empower, completing a company-level exit for Andrew’s first major startup.

2025: Pipe acquired Glean.ai; Gilgamesh closed a $20 million Fund II, bringing reported AUM to approximately $35 million, while its investment mandate became explicitly global.

2026: The portfolio reached approximately 45 global investments; Fintech Leaders continued publishing interviews with major industry figures; and Andrew published Is Finance Technology?. Gilgamesh had largely completed its identity shift from a small U.S./LatAm fintech emerging manager into a global specialist fintech VC built around capital, operator expertise and a proprietary relationship-media network.